It
was there when she opened the door, lying on the carpet in the
middle of her son's bedroom. At first, Clair thought it was a
sausage; a plastic one from the breakfast set Benjamin used to
play with. He was too old for that now, of course, but objects
had a habit of surfacing here, among the Lego and action figures;
the flotsam of an earlier stage. She pressed the switch on the
Dyson with her foot, propped the hose against the wall, and bent
down to pick the object up. She was like a child herself these
days, she thought. She saw something lying on the floor and
picked it up, but she did so without thinking. She'd lost her
curiosity, and only the gesture remained.

Her
hand was inches from the surface when it occurred to her that the
object was too big to be a toy and she froze – one hand on
her knee, trapping the hem of her skirt – and looked again.
It was about four inches long and an inch and a half in diameter;
a dark, raw umber, slightly moist. One end was rounded, the other
tapered almost to a point. Could it really be what she was
beginning to think it was? She knelt down on the carpet and
leaned closer, sniffing a sample of air. It was then that the
thought struck her: I'm
on my knees, in my son's bedroom, sniffing a turd.

Clair
stood up quickly, smoothing the front of her skirt, and stepped
backwards out of the room. There was a queasiness in her stomach.
She closed the door, crossed the landing and went downstairs,
shutting the safety gate behind her. On the way down the hall,
the questions began: was Benjamin ill? Had he failed to reach the
bathroom in time and, if so, why had he said nothing to her,
before she drove him to school? Shame, she supposed;
embarrassment and shame. She'd have to be gentle, sympathetic.
There was no shame in being ill, but he should have asked her for
help; he should have told her, that was all. It was the
not-telling that was the problem, Clair decided; the keeping of
secrets. As soon as she'd collected him from school she would sit
him down and tell him so.

She
went into the kitchen and lifted the phone from its stand and
called the school. But as she waited for the secretary to answer,
Clair began to have doubts. The school day wasn't over yet: what
excuse could she give for collecting him early? I
think my son might be ill.
No, that was no good; she knew what the secretary would say: He's
been here all morning and he seems fine to us, Mrs Vaughn. What
do you think the problem is? She
couldn't tell her, of course. The secretary would probably call a
psychiatrist – for one of them, or both. And then there was
that business with the packed lunch.

She
hit "cancel" and dialled her husband's number instead.
He answered at the second ring.

"I'm
just going into a meeting," he said. "Everything
alright?" He sounded harassed, as always.

Clair
took a deep breath. "There's a turd," she said, "in
our son's bedroom. In the middle of the floor."

Her
husband sighed. "That bloody dog is going to get a kick,"
he said. "Have you called the vet?"

Clair
glanced at Duchamp, curled up in his basket by the back door. It
had not occurred to her that he might be responsible. Her
instinct, she realised, was to blame the boy.

"I
don't think it was Duchamp," she said.

"Are
you suggesting it was our son?" said her husband.

"His
door was shut."

"That
dog can open a door."

"And
close it behind him?"

"Hang
on," said her husband. Clair heard him speaking to someone.
There was a burst of laughter, and when he came back on the line
his voice was different, jaunty It was the voice he put on when
he had an audience. "What does it look like?" he said.

"Well
he must have had an accomplice," Clair replied. "Either
that or he's grown an opposable thumb."

More
laughter. Was she on speakerphone? "Got to go," said
her husband. "Call the vet." And the line went dead.

Clair
replaced the handset. She took a tin of Arden Grange Premium from
the cupboard under the sink and spooned half of it into Duchamp's
bowl. She added a generous scattering of biscuits and watched as
the old dog lumbered over to investigate. Duchamp was her dog; an
assemblageof several breeds but mostly
Springer Spaniel, with regal, Caroline ears that seemed designed
more to muffle sound than augment it. She'd rescued him from an
abandoned litter and taken him home to her bedsit in Camden,
where they'd lived together, happily, for several years. She'd
toilet trained him herself. Compared to Benjamin, the task had
been a joy.

Duchamp
sniffed the bowl and looked up at her with drooping, melancholy
eyes. He was fourteen now. He had problems with his liver. But
she'd taken him for a walk that morning, and scraped his coiled
offering from the pavement. "It wasn't you, boy," she
murmured, stroking his head as he lapped slowly at his food. "I
know it wasn't you."

From
the monitor on the work surface came a gurgling sound. Clair
sighed, heavily, and climbed the stairs. At the top she reached
for the handle of Benjamin's door, but something made her shudder
and recoil. She turned and walked briskly down the landing. In
the nursery at the far end Lucy was awake, standing up in her
cot. She was flicking the bells above her head with one hand and
babbling to herselfShe paid no attention to her mother's arrival.
Clair turned off the air purifier and opened the curtains,
leaning over a stack of wooden packing crates beneath the window.
The room had originally been intended for her studio and its
conversion, even now, was not entirely complete. The crates were
filled with junk from antique shops and skips and market stalls –
objects awaiting new purpose. There was modelling clay and
welding equipment and staple guns and books on conceptual art.
There were experiments in perspective. Somewhere, buried at the
bottom of the last crate, was a half-finished PhD.

Clair
lifted Lucy out of the cot and checked her nappy. Lucy was clean.
Clair carried her downstairs and sat her in the high chair and
fastened a plastic bib around her neck. She opened the fridge
door and took out a small pot of fromage frais and spooned it
slowly into Lucy's indifferent mouth. Half the fromage frais
oozed out again and dribbled onto the bib. Clair wiped up the
mess and set Lucy in the play pen and turned on the TV. Dora the
Explorer was going on a journey to a magical land. The idea, it
seemed, was to follow your dreams.

Clair
washed a stack of Benjamin's lunch boxes and set them on the
sideboard to drain. She made herself a sandwich with some parma
ham left over from Benjamin's packed lunch – he was very
particular about his lunches – and sat alone at the
breakfast table, chewing. By now, she thought, Benjamin would be
suffering agonies of guilt and dread. He'd committed a terrible
crime and was awaiting its discovery. Would his mother come
storming into the playground, into the dining room, into his
class? Would his father be waiting by the door when he came home?
It was just as well that Neil had blamed Duchamp, Clair
reflected. If he hadn't, Benjamin would be in for an earful. What
on earth had he been thinking?

She
turned to the fridge and examined the drawings stuck to the side
for evidence of psychological disturbance. There were felt tip
sketches of the house, of Duchamp, of tractors and spaceships,
wild animals and racing cars. Everything seemed fine. The sun was
a yellow circle ringed with exclamation marks. The colours were
bright. There were no blots on these unfettered landscapes, no
clouds on the horizon (there was no horizon line at all). But she
was not an expert. Perhaps she was missing something.

She'd
have to go back up there, she knew that, but this time she'd go
armed. Clair opened the cupboard under the sink and searched in
vain for a pair of rubber gloves. She walked to the whiteboard
clamped to the door of the fridge and wrote "rubber
gloves"
in small, neat capitals with a red marker. Then she took a can of
Vanishand two disposable J-cloths
and a transparent Ziploc sandwich bag and a pack of antiseptic
wipes and swept them all into her arms. She seized the
pooper-scooper leaning in the corner of the cupboard and marched
out of the kitchen and climbed the stairs. Outside Benjamin's
room she put the cleaning products down and opened the door.

The
turd was still there. For some reason, this surprised her a
little. She leaned against the doorframe and peered at it,
glistening and insouciant, lit by a bar of sunlight from the
window. Something about her theory wasn't right, she thought.
Benjamin was going through a phase of terrible whingeing. His
food was always too hot, or too cold. His tummy hurt. He had a
toothache. He didn't want to go to school. If he'd been feeling
unwell, he would have said so, loudly. Besides, the turd was
lying in the middle of the floor. There was something brazen
about the way it was sitting there, stark against the soft white
carpet. Something angry and defiant. It was a statement, Clair
decided; a challenge. She'd have to be tough. She'd have to
confront him.

The
doorbell rang.

Clair
propped the pooper-scooper against the wall, stepped outside, and
shut the bedroom door carefully behind her. She sniffed the air
on the landing, and hurried down the stairs.

"Clair
de Loon," said Sonia, "thank god you're in! You've
saved me from an afternoon with Cagney
& Lacey."
She bustled her way inside, unwinding her scarf and shaking her
auburn curls. "My sister's visiting," Sonia explained.
"She's taken the twins to the park, the nutter. Thought I'd
come and see how you were coping."

Clair
nodded and closed the front door. In Sonia's estimation, everyone
was either a "nutter" or a "loon". She liked
to surround herself with insanity. It livened up the day.

They
went into the kitchen, Sonia's trainers leaving mud prints on the
clean, checkered tiles. She was dressed in grey tracksuit bottoms
and an Airtex shirt that read "Supermum" in a friendly
typeface edged with silver glitter At art college, her dungarees
had been covered with bright splashes of acrylic. Now it was
scrambled egg and purée: an impasto experiment in colour,
texture and shade. On her left shoulder, at the height of a
baby's resting head, was a three-pointed vomit stain; a little
fleur de lisof puke.

"And
how's young Lucy?" said Sonia, rushing over to the play pen
with open arms. Her voice was like a bright, jolly bell –
"Sonia la Cloche", Clair called her – and at the
sound of it Lucy clapped her hands, jumping up and down on the
mattress. She stared at Sonia with round, glassy eyes.

Clair
set the kettle on the stove and turned on the gas. According to
the health visitor she didn't talk to Lucy enough, but Clair
didn't always see the point. Lucy had nothing interesting to say.

"I
should have brought my sunglasses," said Sonia, squinting at
the kitchen walls. "I always forget how bright it is in
here."

"Like
the future," said Clair. On the outside, the house was just
a featureless newbuild, but the interior was Clair's statement,
her manifesto, her pledge to herself. She'd planned every detail,
sourced the furniture, picked the tiles. The living room was
decorated with found signage, the breakfast table was an Adolf
Loos and the walls, in every room, were pure white. "Asylum
white,” Sonia called it. "Clair de Loon."

Sonia
flopped into a cantilevered chair. "How's the opus?"
she said.

The
"opus" was Clair's long-term project; a series of
objets trouvésloosely inspired by the work
of the Italian conceptual artist, Piero Manzoni. She'd been
working on it ever since Benjamin was born, but progress had been
slow. In the early days she never seemed to have time, and then,
just when she'd finally dispatched Benjamin to school, she
discovered she was pregnant again. Clair told herself that it
didn't matter, that she didn't need a studio, that she could work
at the breakfast table in the afternoons when Lucy was asleep.
But the truth was that the birth of Lucy was the death of her
project. Something could not be born, it seemed, without
something else giving way.

Of
course, it ought to be possible to work. It waspossible. Other people
managed it. Yet somehow it wasn't possible for her. Part of the
problem was that, here, on this vast estate, there were so few
objetsto trouve.
In Camden, a simple walk to the tube station yielded a fresh crop
of finds. But their new house was in a cul-de-sac on the edge of
a planned town: a wasteland of shrivelled birthday balloons and
abandoned tricycles, face down in the encroaching grass. Dogs
trotted back and forth across the street, old tennis balls
clamped in their jaws. Crows pecked chicken bones from the
rubbish. That was all, and Clair's attempts to make something
from it were unsatisfactory. These were her weakest pieces,
regurgitated and second-hand.

She
turned to face Sonia. She hadn't meant to say anything, but
somehow it slipped out. "Benjamin's had an accident,"
she said.

Sonia's
mouth made a cavernous O. "Is he all right?" she said.

"Yes,"
said Clair, quickly. "I mean, he's had an accident in his
pants."

"Thank
god," said Sonia, throwing herself back in the chair.
"Christ, Clair, for a minute I thought it was something
serious." She patted her chest. "Poor lad. Jez had a
nasty tummy bug last week. Devastated the whole gang. I still
feel wretched Is he very poorly?"

"He's
at school," said Clair.

Sonia
pulled a sympathetic face. "Ouch," she said. "Poor
little soldier. How embarrassing. Listen, do you want to go and
collect him? I'll get out of your hair." She pushed the
chair back and offered to rise.

"No,
it's all right," said Clair. "It happened this morning.
Upstairs. I'm not sure what to do about it."

Sonia
held a hand to her throat. "You mean, it's still there?"

Clair
nodded.

"I
see," said Sonia. She paused, and seemed to swallow
something distasteful. "Do you need a … hand?"

They
climbed the stairs. Clair had assumed that Sonia would take it in
her stride. After all, this had been her currency for more than a
decade: a daily dealing in other people's turds. But Sonia's
reaction surprised her.

Clair
studied the turd. It was sleek and deadly, like a fat brown
torpedo. If Benjamin was a soldier, this was his declaration of
war.

"Kevin
dirtied his pants once," said Sonia. "He crawled into
the wardrobe and hid. Took me an hour to find him."

"How
old was he?"

"I
don't know," said Sonia, avoiding her eye. "Four,
maybe."

Clair
nodded. She could see that Sonia was trying to help. But Benjamin
was seven. "What should I do with it?" she said.

"There's
only one thing to do with it, darling," said Sonia.

But
Clair wasn't sure she agreed. Her son had planted a turd on the
floor of his bedroom and gone innocently to school and, when he
came home, he'd find all trace of it removed. Was that the
lesson? That he could do anything he liked? That he could walk
all over her and she would acquiesce, meekly, as if she'd
vanished over the horizon of her life? That he could treat his
mother like – well – like shit? Clair folded her
arms. No. She'd leave it there. She would leave it there on the
floor, exactly where he left it, and when he came back it would
still be there, staring at him. His room would have started to
smell. Only then – only when he'd been forced to confront
what he'd done – only then would she clean up the mess.

She
sniffed the air. The room did not smell. It was odd.

They
went back downstairs. Lucy was banging a plastic teacup against
the bars of her pen. Dora was halfway to the magical land,
accompanied by a talking tree and a star. Some invisible parent
had kindly made her a packed lunch.

The
kettle began to shriek. Clair turned off the gas and reached into
the cupboard for mugs, but Sonia shook her head. "I think
we're beyond that, don't you?" She went over to the fridge
and wrenched open the door. "Aha!" she said, seizing a
bottle of Sancerre by the neck. "Just what the doctor
ordered! Glasses, my dear? Chop chop!"

Clair
hesitated. She had Benjamin to collect, but she could get someone
else to do it. She fetched two fluted wine glasses and unlocked
the back door. Sonia lifted Lucy from the play pen and carried
her into the garden and put her down on the lawn. Her hands
seemed to move without thinking and it struck Clair, not for the
first time, that some women were better suited to motherhood than
others. Sonia seemed to have been born into it.

She
took the glasses and the bottle to the picnic table and sat down.
Duchamp lumbered over to join her. He lay at her feet and rested
his chin on his paws.

"What
am I going to say to him?" said Clair.

"Well,"
said Sonia, pouring her a generous measure, "you could find
out what's bothering him. There must be something he needs to get
off his chest."

"Such
as?"

"I
don't know," said Sonia. "You're his mother. It's a cry
for help, isn't it? Or attention anyway. Isn't that Freud? I'm
sure this is all Freud. Didn't we do this in second year?
Professor Scaltsas? Tweedy, nasty combover, bog breath?"

Clair
swilled the wine in her glass. "I don't seem to have much
call for Freud these days," she said.

"Oh
I think there's plenty of call," said Sonia. "Four
kids? I'm up to my eyeballs in Freud. Sally is knee deep in the
mirror stage."

"The
mirror stage is Lacan," said Clair.

Sonia
snorted and clinked her glass against Clair's. "Still the
boffin, I see," she said.

Next
door, the Wilson children were on the trampoline. Every second or
two their heads would appear above the fence and they'd shriek
and giggle and wave as they started to fall – their hair
screaming from their faces, their cheeks swollen with gravity and
sweets – and vanish once again behind the fence. Sonia
smiled and waved back.

"I
have to say," she said, "it didn't look like a small
boy's stool to me. Kevin's were usually more like rabbit
droppings, I seem to remember. Or cinnamon twists. But then he's
always been a very neat boy."

"Neil
thinks it was Duchamp," said Clair.

"Poor
Duchamp," said Sonia, ruffling the dog's neck. "Not
long for this world now, are you, old boy?"

"It
wasn't Duchamp," said Clair.

Sonia
picked up a biscuit tin standing on the table and prised open the
lid. "What do you think, Lucy?" she said.

Lucy
gazed up at her, a handful of grass halfway to her open mouth.

"She
hasn't formed an opinion," said Clair.

"Funny,"
said Sonia, plucking a Penguin from the tin, "with my lot
the opinion was the first thing to develop."

An
ice cream van arrived in the cul-de-sac with a nautical flourish.
Every day, the van and its mad jingle would appear, drawing local
children like rats. The theme from Blue
Peterjangled in
Clair's brain. The Wilson kids screamed and ran inside.

Sonia
unwrapped the Penguin and dipped it into her wine. "So,"
she began, munching, "if it wasn't Benjy, and it wasn't
Duchamp, who was it?"

"I
don't know," said Clair.

Sonia
rapped the table with her knuckles. "How about some
detective work, Clair?" she said. "Come on! When were
you last in Benjy's room?"

Clair
thought about this. She might have gone into the room that
morning, after she'd taken Benjamin to school, but she couldn't
be sure. The first few hours of her day were pure madness. Lucy
woke around six, if she was lucky. Neil was up thirty minutes
later, belching his way towards the bathroom. She woke Benjamin
at seven. There followed a flurry of activity: four breakfasts,
one packed lunch, four coats, arguments, compromise,
recrimination, revenge. She saw it in fragments: Neil searching
for a tie in the top drawer, Lucy's bottle sterilising in the
microwave, the kettle shrieking on the stove. And Benjamin.

Benjamin
was a nose-picker. He was a nose-picker andeater. He loved spiders and
vampires and horror. For his seventh birthday he'd requested a
tarantula. Failing that, a python. Failing that, a rat. And yet,
some things disgusted him. That morning, for example, he'd
refused to take his packed lunch to school because a fly had
landed on his sandwich while Clair was making it. He'd announced
this with some triumph.

"They
lay eggs," he said, pulling a sour face.

"So
do I," said Clair.

She
remembered driving him to school. She remembered the car door
slam. She remembered the long drive home in slow traffic, Lucy
strapped into the car seat, her babbling the only sound from the
back, but the rest of the morning, from ten onwards, was blank.

"What
we need," said Sonia, "is a list of suspects." She
sprang to her feet and started doing hopscotch on the lawn: "Two,
four, six, eight, who can we eliminate?" At the flower bed
she stopped and turned to Clair. "What about Isla?" she
said.

"The
babysitter?"

"Babyshitter,"
said Sonia, "as Sean Connery would say. Doesn't she have a
dodgy boyfriend? Sneaks over when you're not around?"

Isla
did have a dodgy boyfriend. Clair had caught her with him one
evening, in
flagranteon the
vintage Le Corbusier sofa. Clair made sure the sofa was
professionally cleaned.

"She
doesn't have a key," she said. "Besides, we haven't
used her for weeks."

"How
about the cleaner, then?" said Sonia. "Whatserface?
Ludmilla?"

Clair
shook her head. It was Tuesday. Ludmilla came on Thursdays.

"And
what about you, young lady?" said Sonia, turning to Lucy
with a fierce, squinting expression. "Have you been making a
mess on your brother's floor? That's
what I think of you, bro!"

Lucy
giggled. Her tongue was bright green.

Sonia
hopscotched back to the table and flopped into her seat. Her
copper earrings jangled. "Well, I'm stumped," she said.
"What you've got here is an immaculate turd. You should
charge admission. Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise."

"Pretty
good disguise," said Clair.

Sonia
took a sip of her wine. "I'm afraid it has to be Duchamp,
darling," she said. "There's no other explanation."

"It
wasn't Duchamp," said Clair, sharply. Her fingers gripped
the edge of the table. Her tone took them both by surprise.

"If
you say so," said Sonia.

They
were silent for a while. Clair gulped her wine. The breeze had
picked up, the back fence rattled in the wind, and from the
houses all around came a chorus of inconsolable screams.

Suddenly,
Sonia gasped and clapped her hands. "I've got a brilliant
idea!" she said. "We'll take Duchamp upstairs and see
if he gives himself away. Get him to finger the culprit! Or paw."

"Duchamp's
not a sniffer dog," said Clair.

"All
dogs are sniffer dogs, darling," said Sonia. "It's what
they do."

They
went back inside. Reluctantly, Clair put Duchamp on the leash. As
she led him towards the front door his tail began to wag but,
when she turned and opened the safety gate, he barked and held
his ground. Clair had to drag him by the collar.

"This
is exciting," said Sonia, as they climbed the stairs. "Just
like Cagney &
Lacey. You be
Christine and I'll be Mary Beth." She said some other
things, but Clair didn't hear them.

They
arrived outside Benjamin's room. Sonia waited at the threshold
while Clair led Duchamp across the white carpet and removed the
lead.

Duchamp
glanced at the turd. He stooped and gave the air around it a
cursory sniff. He looked up at Clair with sad, accusing eyes.
Then he turned towards the door. For a moment Clair was afraid he
was going to step in it. She had visions of shit trodden all over
the house, of clustered paw prints on every pristine surface.
But, without so much as another glance, Duchamp stepped over the
turd and lumbered out of the room.

"See,"
said Clair. "I told you it wasn't him."

Sonia
was looking at her strangely. There were splashes of furious
crimson on her cheeks. "Yes, I see," she said. "Yes
I do see."

Clair
turned back to the room. She tried again to recall what she'd
done that morning, but all she could think of was Benjamin,
making a scene over his lunch: how he'd whimpered when she
refused to make another one, how he whinged and cried and kicked
her when she threw it away. How he sulked on the way to school.
How he told her he hated her and slammed the car door in her
face. That was all.

Sonia
took a step into the room. She bent over the little huddle of
cleaning products on the floor and picked up the transparent,
Ziploc sandwich bag. She seized the pooper-scooper and held it
out to Clair.

"Let's
get this over with," she said.

Clair
took the bag and the pooper-scooper from her. She got down on her
knees and scooped up the turd, tipping it carefully into the bag.
It was heavy – the weight of a good meal. She slid the zip
across and placed the bag on the carpet to one side. Sonia passed
her the can of Vanish,
and Clair sprayed the spot where the turd had sat. There was no
stain, but she scrubbed the carpet anyway. Then she got to her
feet and opened the window.

"Thank
you, Clair," said Sonia, when the work was done. "Thank
you."

Together
they headed back down the stairs: Sonia la Cloche and Clair de
Loon. On the way, Sonia's phone began to jingle. She pulled it
out and checked it and sighed. "Jez has come off his
tricycle," she said. "No rest for the wicked."

They
went into the hall. Sonia wound her scarf around her neck. "Good
to see you," she said, and made to embrace Clair, but
checked herself just in time. Clair was still holding the
sandwich bag and inside, nestled in translucence like a strange
goldfish, was the turd. "For god's sake," said Sonia,
"get rid of that before Benjy sees it."

"I
was thinking of burying it," said Clair.

"It's
not a relative, darling," Sonia snapped. She opened the
front door and paused and put a hand on Clair's arm. "I'll
pop round tomorrow," she said, softly, "Clair de Loon."

Clair
nodded and shut the door behind her. Tomorrow, she thought, she'd
better close the blinds.

She
returned to the kitchen and put the sandwich bag on the breakfast
table and sat down. She emptied the wine bottle into her glass
and looked at the turd. Its rich, warm hues glowed in the
afternoon light. There was something strangely satisfying about
the shape of it, she thought: something solid and reassuring. In
its own way, it was rather beautiful.

The
phone rang.

"What
did the vet say?" said Neil.

"He
said it wasn't Duchamp," said Clair. "He said you
should leave him alone."

There
was a pause on the other end of the line. "You didn't take
him then," said her husband.

Clair
said nothing.

Neil
sighed. "This is only going to get worse," he said.

Clair
hung up and drained her glass. In the play pen, Lucy had fallen
asleep, the terrible, blank canvas of her face pressed against
the bars. Dora's quest was long since complete. Clair carried
Lucy upstairs and put her to bed in the cot. Any minute now, she
thought, the phone would ring again. She should have collected
Benjamin from school. But how could she? How could she bring him
home when there was a turd in the house, lying on the kitchen
table? What kind of a mother would do that?

She
reached over the packing crates to close the curtains and
stopped. She looked at the crates for a moment, then she turned
and walked out of the room. A minute later she returned,
clutching one of Benjamin's lunch boxes. In her other hand was
the sandwich bag. She put the lunch box on the carpet and removed
the lid and laid the sandwich bag carefully inside. Then she went
over to the top crate and pulled out a staple gun. She stapled
the top of the sandwich bag to one side of the lunch box, and
stood the box upright on the other. The bag, and its contents,
was now suspended from the roof of the box.

Lucy
gurgled in her sleep.

Clair
rummaged around inside the crate and found her toolkit. She
picked up the lunch box and the toolkit and carried them across
the landing. The walls of Benjamin's bedroom were a gallery of
enthusiasms – posters of planets and racing cars and
dinosaurs and spacemen – but his door was still untouched
and pure white. Asylum white.

Clair
pulled the door shut and pressed the lunch box against it and
reached for a nail. Trapping the nail against the back of the box
with her thumb and forefinger, she pulled a hammer from her
toolkit and swung hard. The nail slammed through the plastic and
into the door. Clair swung the hammer a second time, then a
third. She picked up another nail and hammered it into the box.
Behind her, Lucy woke and started to cry. It was a terrible
sound; plaintive and agonised, the wail of a body that had woken
to find itself alone, but Clair made no move to comfort her.
Instead, she reached into her pocket for a marker pen, noticing
as she did so that she'd cut her finger on the nail and drawn
blood. She squeezed a drop out and let it fall, watching as it
splashed on the carpet. Then she leaned over the lunch box and
wrote "Packed Lunch [No.2]" on Benjamin's door in neat,
black letters.

Downstairs,
the phone began to ring. Clair snapped the top of the pen into
place and stepped back to survey her work. It wasn't much, she
thought. But it was a start.

Alistair
Danielhas
an MA in Creative Writing from the University of London. His
short stories have appeared in journals including The
Stinging Flyand
Stand,
and he was shortlisted for the 2010 Bridport Prize and longlisted
for the 2011 Fish Short Story Prize. He was a Charles Pick Fellow
at the University of East Anglia and has just completed his first
novel. He lives in Ireland and teaches creative writing for the
Open University in the UK.